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RIYL : Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird & The National. Happy Abandon trade in high drama. From soaring songs to string-laden production, the aforementioned light and fog that accent the mood and set the scenery for their live shows, to the way Peter Vance, Justin Ellis, and Jake Waits talk about their music -with determined passion, vivid detail, and engrossing vigor - they bring with them a sense that much more is at stake than just writing and playing songs. Forming in early 2015, the members of Happy Abandon were hardly strangers. Operating in the same circles that are the cogs of any small, tightly knit scene, Vance, Ellis, and Waits had known each other for years before as students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Within a few weeks of first playing together, they worked their way onto bills at local shows and by year's end Happy Abandon was hitting the road, touring through nearly every state east of Texas and Canada. It was at SXSW that the band initially hooked up with North Carolina music denizen and future label head Stephen Judge, playing multiple slots at his annual SXSW party. The band continued to write, to tour etc when, in late 2016, they suffered the unexpected loss of three dear friends in three separate incidences. In dealing with these heartbreaking premature deaths, in concert with the trials and travails of everyday life, the songs began to pour out en masse, with subjects ranging from personal loss to abandonment to homelessness - which singer Peter Vance suffered for a stint - to heartbreak to the indomitable power of will. It was through this lens that the band began to see this new set of songs on a grander perspective and began to realize that the wider concept behind their music was the idea that a person needs to feel life. Happy Abandon soon found themselves with a batch of the best songs they'd yet written and soon decamped to the tiny hamlet Macon, North Carolina to create their album. Their brand of genre bending art music, deep-rooted in pop sensibilities more finely honed than ever before. Happy Abandon captured at once their high flair, their foreboding sensibility and their warmth in a record that is at-once propulsive yet patient, dark, and distant while warm and engaging. Track Listing: 01. Ivory Bound 02. Beneath Our Feet 03. Love Like Language 04. Take Me 05. Severed Seams 06. Choice 07. If I Stare 08. Stop Taking Care of Me 09. Heavy Lines 10. Cursed or Worse